Is Machine Translation Taking Over the Translating World?

There may be a day when Nexus 6 Androids take over the world (why yes, that was a Philip Dick reference). There may be a day when the intelligence of machines will surpass that of our puny human brains, but that day has yet to come.

Machine Translation (or MT) has greatly evolved over the years. Programs are slowly studying the rules of language in order to fully decode a text and re-encode it in another language. The methods and the results improve with every passing year.

"Google Translate" and other such machine translations are perfect tools for assisting human translators in their work (as in Computer Aided Translation), and at times they even prove sufficient in getting the message across without any additional assistance from a human translator. The use of websites such as "Google Translate" by human translators is prevalent now a days and machine translations make the job a whole lot easier; however we are still a far cry away from human translators becoming obsolete.

One must consider these machine translations with a grain of salt. This form of translation is constantly evolving, but programmers have yet to find the perfect way to "train" these machines to "understand" the texts they're encoding and as a result, popular phrases, idioms and slang are constantly misinterpreted.

In short, there is no need to fear these intelligent beings. The truth is that translation requires not only knowledge, but a great amount of common sense, something our machine brethren have yet to acquire.